Homelands Pt. 08 Ch. 05

"What have I now," said the Faerie Queen "What have I now," this proud young woman did say "I have one humble court, no glitterin' jewels Me petty children shall no more rule over thee Let all walk the Dreaming, and all love as love shall Have all the children ye like, with whomever you like," said she.

As the song ended, time resumed. Only it didn't pick up where it had left off. The images of the queen were gone, and the rest of Clan Walker, all in fey form, had joined them.

"Kay? Kay!" his mother asked, a hint of panic in her voice.

"What?" he asked. "I'm sorry. I just...did you hear that?"

"We all heard it," Brittany said. "How could we not? Sure was a fuckload of Titanias, wasn't it? That woman knows how to be heard."

"You alright, man?" Seamus asked.

"Were you hearing music again?" Aeife asked.

Everyone looked at her as though she'd asked the strangest question. Why would he have been hearing music, and why would that be again? When he nodded, they looked at him as though he'd confessed to drinking green light and eating loud noises each morning.

"It was this old folk song, but different," Cahill said. Wow, did that sound vague. And a little crazy. "The queen was singing about how the courts have brought her nothing but misery because her children squabble over them, so she's dissolving them. There won't be any more Princes or anything. It's like we're all Dreamsmyths now. We can come and go as we please. Have as many children as we want, by whomever we want." He snorted. "Wouldn't that be nice. So what did she really say?"

"Pretty much that," Finnegan said flatly.

"She didn't," Cahill said.

"She did," his mother told him, running her fingers through the hair above his ear. "You were standing right here. You really didn't hear her?"

"Can I talk to him alone?" Aeife asked.

Caronwyn gave her mother a cool look, but the older woman didn't so much as blink. She knew what she was asking. How reluctant her daughter was to part with her son when something was clearly wrong with him. Realizing that she wasn't going to win, his mother bowed her head in submission and offered a faint nod.

The others were already starting to clear out.

"You know what this means?" Cahill heard Seamus ask Fiona in an uncharacteristically excited tone. Their sister's response, however, he didn't hear.

"I'll be okay," Cahill told his mother before bending down to plant a kiss on her lips.

"I hope so," she muttered. "You're in good hands, at least."

Then she went up on tiptoes and gave him another kiss. A lingering one, wrought with fear and concern and reluctance. As she settled back onto her heels, she gave him a sad little smile. Finally, his mother gave his hand a squeeze and left.

For a time, neither he nor his grandmother spoke. Then she walked right up to him and stuck her fingers inside his head, the way Liadan had once done.

"Hmmm," she said.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Awfully delicate handiwork," she said, almost reverently. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing. And took their time doing it."

"Doing what?" he asked, heartbeat accelerating. "What couldn't my mother hear this?"

His grandmother gave him her best "Are you shitting me?" look before saying, "Because you're going to tell me what I want to know. And that's going to include some things you'd rather not share. Things you probably haven't told your mother."

"Oh," he said, without bothering to argue.

"Now, I can't say I approve of you keeping secrets from her," Aeife continued. "But that's between the two of you."

He nodded.

Then his grandmother punched him in the gut. Hard. Maybe not as hard as she could have, powerful as she was, but harder than a mortal woman of her physique could have managed. Hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

"Only it's not really. Because she's my daughter. And you might be my grandson, but that doesn't count nearly as much. So I'm gonna tell you the same thing I told your father a few years ago. If you hurt my Caron, physically or emotionally, I'll cut your dick off, give it a good dry rub, barbecue it, and feed it to you."

"Well," Cahill said, "doesn't that make for a lovely image."

"Lovely wasn't the point."

"Yes, Grandma."

She gave him an approving. "That's more like it."

He really shouldn't have needed threats from his grandmother to know that he'd fucked up. That his mother deserved to know all there was to know about Liadan.

Heck, there wasn't even much to hide.

"So," Aeife said. "Start talking."

"About?" he said, not knowing where to start.

Did his aunt even have anything to do with whatever his grandmother had found inside his head? Was it going help anything for him to confess that it wasn't his mother, or even a Walker, who'd convinced him to leave the Dreaming?

Well, yeah, obviously it was. If nothing else, it would solve his "Grandma is going to kick my ass if I don't come clean about everything I've ever done wrong, right down to the cigarette I smoked in sixth grade" problem. Which, just at the moment, seemed a lot worse than randomly hearing bastardizations of old Irish folk songs.

So he told her everything. Well, he left out his early experiments with alcohol and tobacco, and every other youthful indiscretion from the Dreaming. But he did his best to recount every detail from the day he'd met Liadan, whether it seemed pertinent or not.

His grandmother sat silent through it all, aside from the occasional clarifying question. She betrayed no reaction. Just tried to get the facts.

Only when he finished and asked if any of that helped did she say, "It does, actually."

"You know why I'm hearing things?"

Aeife nodded. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do at that moment, she picked an acorn up off the ground and handed it to him.

"Um, okay," Cahill said. "And I do...what with this? Make tea?"

"Eat it," she said.

"Eat it? Raw?" he asked. "Without even leaching the tannins?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "You think we're in the Dreaming? These are true oak trees. Their nuts are anything but bitter. Haven't you learned anything yet?"

Cahill shrugged and popped the acorn in his mouth.

She was right. It wasn't bitter. It wasn't almost sweet, particularly in the aftertaste. Mostly, it tasted nutty and earthy. And it gave him an instant buzz. Not like the jolt of caffeine, but more like the mellow high of marijuana.

"Good, huh?" his grandmother asked.

He simply smiled in response.

"You might be ready to hear this, then," she said. "I can't do anything for you."

"What?"

"If you had memories locked away, I could help you recover them. If you were under a geis, I could remove it. But what we've got here is much more complicated than that."

Cahill drew a deep breath. There were worse things than going through life never knowing when a song would spontaneously break out inside one's head. But the fact that someone had done something to him that his grandmother couldn't undo was freaky.

He understood now why his grandmother had responded the way she had earlier, when he'd expressed skepticism over her claim that Titania hated her because she reminded the queen that she was vulnerable. It was one thing to know that there was an abstract possibility of being harmed, quite another to worry that it might actually happen, and at any time.

"Looks like there are two glamours here," Aeife said, "woven together so intricately that it would take greater talent than I possess to disentangle them. And the problem is, one is linked not just to the memory of its creation, but to most every memory you have."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that any attempt to remove the one," a voice said from behind a nearby tree, "could cause the other to erase your identity. Everything that makes you who you are."

The strangest little fox walked into the clearing. The very tip of its tail was white, and its face and hindquarters had silver highlights, but otherwise it was black as pitch.

As he and his grandmother watched, the black fox stood on its hind legs and turned into a beautiful dark-skinned woman. None other than the Puck.

"How long d'you think it would've taken ye to figure that out on yer own?" Liadan asked as she tossed her hair back. "A year? Maybe two?"

"You did this?" Cahill asked.

"Well, sorta," she replied with a grin. "The musical part's your work, believe it or not. But the rest, aye, that was me."

"You'll undo it then," Aeife demanded.

"I'm afraid I can't be doin' that," she replied in an utterly remorseless tone. "You see, the first thing I did after buggerin' the lad's mind as best I could was ask me brother to make me forget how I did it, and ol' Arawn's right good at what he does."

Cahill stared at her in disbelief. Had he actually trusted this woman? Believed that they had some sort of special connection he had to hide from his mother?

What was wrong with him? She was the fucking Lady of Mischief. No being in Faerie could possibly be less trustworthy than the Puck.

"Why?" he asked.

For her part, his grandmother looked like taut bowstring.

"Oh, relax," his aunt said. "The boy's owed a boon by his father. If there's one person who can clean up that mess without any difficulty, it's the Lord of Remembrance."

"So that was the whole point?" Cahill asked, his head spinning. "To get me to waste the boon you helped me earn?"

Liadan gave him a puzzled look. "You think that's a waste?"

Cahill huffed. "So what was the point?"

"Why, to get him to owe me another boon, of course," she said.

"You bitch," Aeife spat.

"I'm sorry, did you like being my mother's bitch?" Liadan asked. "Should I apologize for setting our boy here on a path that led him to secure your freedom? Or for putting the idea in Oberon's head that maybe he should pay Clan Walker a visit?"

"I don't get it," Cahill said. "What are you after?"

She shrugged. "Mischief."

"Seriously," he said.

Liadan sighed. "I might not have known at the start that everything would play out so brilliantly, but I had an idea that me mum might freak out and knock all the pieces of the board if things stopped going her way." She paused before adding, "I've only been the Puck for a lil while, yeah, but I'm already bloody tired of it."

"What do you want?" Aeife asked.

"To tell the fucking truth, not very damn much," she replied. "Me brother for starters. A few wee ones bearing his blood and mine, if I'm dreaming big."

Neither Cahill nor his grandmother had anything to say to that.

"Anyway," she said, "talk to your da. He'll fix you up. For a price." And with that, she went fox again and took her leave of them.

#

After everyone fell asleep, she summoned him. As he knew she should.

Reilly knelt before his queen, speaking not a word.

"Red," Titania said, offering him her hand.

Quickly cataloguing the colors of her nails, he kissed her knuckles. They were carnation pink, moss green, dark blue, bright yellow, and royal purple. As breathtaking as ever.

He loved that about his queen, as he did everything else about her. She made all other women seem bland. Drab. Monochromatic.

"Where's Black?" she asked.

She'd asked him a question. That meant he could speak. His heartbeat accelerated.

"With the Cow," he said.

That was one of the only names for his grandmother Titania allowed them to use. Pig, Whore, Beast, and Whale were also permitted. Her actual name, of course, was not.

"Suppose we shouldn't wait for him then," his bringer of life and light said.

Ungrateful wretch that he was, he'd wanted to say, "As my queen wishes." Not that he could have, but the mere wanting made him feel guilty.

"You've done as I instructed?"

He nodded. He could have replied aloud since she'd asked him a direct question, but it didn't please her to hear him use words when a non-verbal response would suffice. And Reilly had no reason for being but to please his queen. His goddess. His everything.

"And have you needed to speak to them?"

Again he nodded.

"Not much, I hope?"

He shook his head.

"Good," Titania replied. She tapped a delightful fingertip against her magenta lips. "They've no reason to suspect then?"

His family knew that he'd changed, but they thought him broken. Docile. They didn't know that he'd been fixed. Completed. Given purpose.

"Of course not," she said, petting him. "Good boy, Red. Good boy."

Those wonderful words nearly made him ejaculate. Nothing could have brought him more pleasure than serving his queen dutifully and having her recognize that service.

"I've got some new instructions for you."

He looked up at her eagerly.

The hand atop his head slid down beneath his chin and scratched at his beard. "Your kin will soon begin breeding. I'll stop by from time to time to ask who's carrying whose child, so I need you to keep track. Can you do that for me?"

Reilly nodded.

She graced him with a soft kiss atop his bald head. The brief contact with her sweet lips made him shudder in ecstasy as a wave of intense pleasure rolled over him.

"We're going to have to keep the charade up for some time, I'm afraid," she informed him. "But you'll be rewarded when it's over. You and Black will come back to me."

He wasn't sure what charade she was referring to, but it didn't matter. The last part was all he'd needed to hear. However long he had to wait, he'd wait patiently, knowing that infinite bliss awaited him on the other end.

The brief time he'd spent serving as the queen's personal guard and living fucktoy had been the happiest in his life. He'd experienced pleasures such as no man had ever known. Pain and humiliation as well, but only when he misbehaved and thus deserved it. Which hadn't been often. As his goddess herself had said, he was a good boy.

"Too bad Black can't join us," she said as she slipped out of her gown. "You'll just have to work that much harder."

Reilly was more than happy to do just that. Using power he borrowed from her, he split himself into two bodies so that he could better tend to his queen's many needs. He still wasn't good enough for her, of course. No man, or army of men, could ever be. But at least his efforts were less inadequate.